The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson – Swanston Edition. Volume 10. Robert Louis Stevenson
no way to diminish; for in proportion as grief and indignation abated, fear began to take their place. At first, his father’s menacing words lay by in some safe drawer of memory, biding their hour. At first, John was all thwarted affection and blighted hope; next bludgeoned vanity raised its head again, with twenty mortal gashes; and the father was disowned even as he had disowned the son. What was this regular course of life, that John should have admired it? what were these clock-work virtues, from which love was absent? Kindness was the test, kindness the aim and soul; and judged by such a standard, the discarded prodigal – now rapidly drowning his sorrows and his reason in successive drams – was a creature of a lovelier morality than his self-righteous father. Yes, he was the better man; he felt it, glowed with the consciousness, and entering a public-house at the corner of Howard Place (whither he had somehow wandered) he pledged his own virtues in a glass – perhaps the fourth since his dismissal. Of that he knew nothing, keeping no account of what he did or where he went; and in the general crashing hurry of his nerves, unconscious of the approach of intoxication. Indeed, it is a question whether he were really growing intoxicated, or whether at first the spirits did not even sober him. For it was even as he drained this last glass that his father’s ambiguous and menacing words – popping from their hiding-place in memory – startled him like a hand laid upon his shoulder. “Crimes, hunted, the gallows.” They were ugly words; in the ears of an innocent man, perhaps all the uglier; for if some judicial error were in act against him, who should set a limit to its grossness or to how far it might be pushed? Not John, indeed; he was no believer in the powers of innocence, his cursed experience pointing in quite other ways; and his fears, once wakened, grew with every hour and hunted him about the city streets.
It was perhaps nearly nine at night; he had eaten nothing since lunch, he had drunk a good deal, and he was exhausted by emotion, when the thought of Houston came into his head. He turned, not merely to the man as a friend, but to his house as a place of refuge. The danger that threatened him was still so vague, that he knew neither what to fear nor where he might expect it; but this much at least seemed undeniable, that a private house was safer than a public inn. Moved by these counsels, he turned at once to the Caledonian Station, passed (not without alarm) into the bright lights of the approach, redeemed his portmanteau from the cloak-room, and was soon whirling in a cab along the Glasgow road. The change of movement and position, the sight of the lamps twinkling to the rear, and the smell of damp and mould and rotten straw which clung about the vehicle, wrought in him strange alternations of lucidity and mortal giddiness.
“I have been drinking,” he discovered; “I must go straight to bed, and sleep.” And he thanked Heaven for the drowsiness that came upon his mind in waves.
From one of these spells he was awakened by the stoppage of the cab; and, getting down, found himself in quite a country road, the last lamp of the suburb shining some way below, and the high walls of a garden rising before him in the dark. The Lodge (as the place was named) stood, indeed, very solitary. To the south it adjoined another house, but standing in so large a garden as to be well out of cry; on all other sides, open fields stretched upward to the woods of Corstorphine Hill, or backward to the dells of Ravelston, or downward towards the valley of the Leith. The effect of seclusion was aided by the great height of the garden walls, which were, indeed, conventual, and, as John had tested in former days, defied the climbing schoolboy. The lamp of the cab threw a gleam upon the door and the not brilliant handle of the bell.
“Shall I ring for ye?” said the cabman, who had descended from his perch, and was slapping his chest, for the night was bitter.
“I wish you would,” said John, putting his hand to his brow in one of his accesses of giddiness.
The man pulled at the handle, and the clanking of the bell replied from further in the garden; twice and thrice he did it, with sufficient intervals; in the great, frosty silence of the night the sounds fell sharp and small.
“Does he expect ye?” asked the driver, with that manner of familiar interest that well became his port-wine face; and when John had told him no, “Well, then,” said the cabman, “if ye’ll tak’ my advice of it, we’ll just gang back. And that’s disinterested, mind ye, for my stables are in the Glesgie road.”
“The servants must hear,” said John.
“Hout!” said the driver. “He keeps no servants here, man. They’re a’ in the town house; I drive him often; it’s just a kind of a hermitage this.”
“Give me the bell,” said John; and he plucked at it like a man desperate.
The clamour had not yet subsided before they heard steps upon the gravel, and a voice of singular nervous irritability cried to them through the door, “Who are you, and what do you want?”
“Alan,” said John, “it’s me – it’s Fatty – John, you know. I’m just come home, and I’ve come to stay with you.”
There was no reply for a moment, and then the door was opened.
“Get the portmanteau down,” said John to the driver.
“Do nothing of the kind,” said Alan; and then to John, “Come in here a moment. I want to speak to you.”
John entered the garden, and the door was closed behind him. A candle stood on the gravel walk, winking a little in the draughts; it threw inconstant sparkles on the clumped holly, struck the light and darkness to and fro like a veil on Alan’s features, and sent his shadow hovering behind him. All beyond was inscrutable; and John’s dizzy brain rocked with the shadow. Yet even so, it struck him that Alan was pale, and his voice, when he spoke, unnatural.
“What brings you here to-night?” he began. “I don’t want, God knows, to seem unfriendly; but I cannot take you in, Nicholson; I cannot do it.”
“Alan,” said John, “you’ve just got to! You don’t know the mess I’m in; the governor’s turned me out, and I daren’t show face in an inn, because they’re down on me for murder or something!”
“For what?” cried Alan, starting.
“Murder, I believe,” says John.
“Murder!” repeated Alan, and passed his hand over his eyes. “What was that you were saying?” he asked again.
“That they were down on me,” said John. “I’m accused of murder, by what I can make out; and I’ve really had a dreadful day of it, Alan, and I can’t sleep on the roadside on a night like this – at least, not with a portmanteau,” he pleaded.
“Hush!” said Alan, with his head on one side; and then, “Did you hear nothing?” he asked.
“No,” said John, thrilling, he knew not why, with communicated terror. “No, I heard nothing; why?” And then, as there was no answer, he reverted to his pleading: “But I say, Alan, you’ve just got to take me in. I’ll go right away to bed if you have anything to do. I seem to have been drinking; I was that knocked over. I wouldn’t turn you away, Alan, if you were down on your luck.”
“No?” returned Alan. “Neither will I you, then. Come and let’s get your portmanteau.”
The cabman was paid, and drove off down the long, lamp-lit hill, and the two friends stood on the side-walk beside the portmanteau till the last rumble of the wheels had died in silence. It seemed to John as though Alan attached importance to this departure of the cab; and John, who was in no state to criticise, shared profoundly in the feeling.
When the stillness was once more perfect, Alan shouldered the portmanteau, carried it in, and shut and locked the garden door; and then, once more, abstraction seemed to fall upon him, and he stood with his hand on the key, until the cold began to nibble at John’s fingers.
“Why are we standing here?” asked John.
“Eh?” said Alan blankly.
“Why, man, you don’t seem yourself,” said the other.
“No, I’m not myself,” said Alan; and he sat down on the portmanteau and put his face in his hands.
John stood beside him swaying a little, and looking about him at the swaying shadows, the flitting sparkles, and the steady stars overhead,